


The More Interesting Bits

by Catchclaw



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: After the Not-End of the World, Cats, Curtain Fic, Domestic, Feelings, First Kiss, Fluff, M/M, Mutual Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-09
Updated: 2019-06-09
Packaged: 2020-04-23 12:12:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19150795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catchclaw/pseuds/Catchclaw
Summary: “But there’s nothing todohere,” Crowley whinged for the third time in half an hour.“And that,” Aziraphale said (again), “is precisely the point of us living here, isn’t it? One has to make their own fun.”“Oh, fuck me!”





	1. Chapter 1

“But there’s nothing to _do_ here,” Crowley whinged for the third time in half an hour.

“And that,” Aziraphale said (again), “is precisely the point of us living here, isn’t it? One has to make their own fun.”

“Oh, fuck me!”

This had not, it’s worth noting, been Crowley’s response on the previous two occasions, some ten and twenty-two minutes before. His first response had been less a rejoinder and more a sort of unhappy grunt; and the second, while still peevish, had not involved any profanity. Not that Aziraphale disapproved of profanity. He found it quite useful, actually, particularly when working with the fruit trees in the garden whose temperaments, be they savory or citrus, he found baffling on the best days, which were few and far between, so he spent a lot of time cursing at lemons. It had, so far as he could tell, no measurable effect on the size, quality, or relative juiciness of the trees’ offerings, but it made him feel immensely satisfied. That it made Crowley laugh to see him raging at plants was, of course, solely a bonus.

But this time, this third time when he attempted to council Crowley through his by-now-familiar complaints about the cottage, his friend had chosen to be profane. And in a very particular way, one he’d never before heard ever set forth from the demon’s mouth and it was this novelty that made Aziraphale’s response as inartful as it was.

“No,” he said with an out-of-sync smile, “that isn’t on the table, I don’t think. Is it? No.”

On the other side of the tea table, Crowley tilted his head, a bite of cherry tart frozen halfway to his mouth. 6000 years, he’d known the angel. 6000 years and a million conversations and never, in all the sentences that had come before, had he heard Aziraphale in any human language fall so far as to use a double negative. He was prickly about such things: grammar and sentence structure and some kind of bollocks called “diagramming a sentence.” Crowley had seen him break out a pencil and a newspaper sometimes and do that daft bit for fun.

This, too, then, was worth noting, though in that moment, as the crickets peeped down near the creek and the cats snored in the grass, Crowley couldn’t put his finger on why.

So he asked.

“What was that?”

Aziraphale was pretending to pour himself more tea. The pot was empty. It was awkward. “Hmmm?”

“That, just now. What you said. The thing about what is or is not on the table.”

A trill of laughter, the awful nervous kind. Aziraphale gave up on the teapot and picked up his fork. He felt his face flush the way it sometimes did if he puttered about too long in the sun. But it was cloudy, a few minutes from rain, so there was no heavenly body--except his own, of course--to blame.

“It was a joke,” he said lamely. “A verbal riposte. A very poor one. Can we not discuss it anymore, please?”

Crowley took that bite of his tart and eyed his friend suspiciously. “A joke?” The angel hadn’t sounded like he was joking. He’d sounded like he was about to choke on his tongue.

“Yes. That is what I said.” Aziraphale’s gaze met his briefly and then skittered out over the veranda and scurried over the lawn. “May we turn to another subject?”

“A joke.” Crowley shook his head with a sigh. “Oh, Az. We’ve talked about this.”

“I am aware.”

“It’s not that you don’t have a sense of humor. That’s not it at all. You’re very funny, mostly. It’s just that--”

“It’s just that you haven’t recovered from my lengthy and in your words 'regrettable' infatuation with puns in 1874,” Aziraphale said with exasperation. “I know, I know.”

“Well,” Crowley said, settling back into the garden chair. “Yes, exactly. You can’t blame me. It was absolutely appalling. Especially when you tried to come up with them in advance, do you remember that?” He snorted. “You had a cheat sheet snuck inside your glove for awhile."

Although being reminded of his past errors in linguistic judgement was no piece of cake, Aziraphale was pleased by this turn of events. Crowley, it seemed, had been struck only by the structure of his statement and not by its implications. So much the better for that.

“Never mind,” Aziraphale said. He managed to conjure a tone of chagrin. “Your point is taken.”

“So we’re agreed, then.”

“On what, exactly?”

“No more language-based attempts at humor from you, angel. Not for the foreseeable future.” Crowley chuckled. “Not for another couple of hundred years, at least.”

“Agreed. And may I gently remind you of the co-equal part of that same agreement which you broke yesterday? No singing inside the house. It makes the cats terribly skittish. And the cows two farms over; I heard one was found foaming at the mouth.”

Crowley’s lips twitched. “No, you didn’t. You made that up.”

“I did,” Aziraphale said. “When I was in town today. There was something about a ear-piercing shriek from the west.”

Crowley chucked a napkin at him; the white cloth didn’t get very far. Still, he thought, watching Aziraphale fish the thing out of the jelly, point made. “So noted,” he said, not trying to hide his smile. It was nice, that. His favorite thing about living out in the middle of bloody nowhere: he smiled all the time now. He had subscribed it at first to a kind of relief, a weight lifted, but over time, as they’d settled into their new life, the smiling thing had shown no signs of abating. “What’s for supper?”

Aziraphale looked scandalized. “But we’ve only just had tea!”

“Tch,” Crowley said. “I want to know what I have to look forward to, that’s all. I like watching you in the kitchen, angel.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re in your element. You and your fancy wine and your braised pork chops and your arugula salad thingy with soft cheese and tomatoes.” Crowley waved his hands about. He sounded sentimental; he felt it. But when it came to Aziraphale, he'd decided long ago that sentiment was all right. “It’s a bit of a show, that. Very entertaining. Especially when you set things on fire.”

“One tea towel in nine months, Crowley, one. Are you ever going to get me forget that?”

Crowley nudged the plate of sweets over. There was one cherry tart left; he stared at it pointedly until Aziraphale picked it up and took a big, indulgent bite just as the first raindrops fell at their feet. “No,” he said. “Not just yet.”

And that is how--after much scrambling of plates and teacups and unhappy, newly sodden cats--Aziraphale sailed through the evening convinced that the cause of his momentary lapse of discretion in re: _fuck me_ had been so thoroughly misread by Crowley that the matter was, for all intents and purposes, dead.  
  
Except in the middle of Crowley’s favorite program--a find-the-next-popstar thing--he snapped upright on the sofa during a misguided rendition of Take That’s _Rule the World_ and said: “Hang on. Were you talking about  _sex_?”


	2. Chapter 2

Aziraphale nearly dropped his brandy. It was good that he didn’t; not only was it a glass from his favorite French distillery, but Susan the cat, curled snug in his lap, would have been drenched twice in one day. 

“What?” he squawked.

Crowley squinted through the flickering light of the television. Saw his friend’s trembling hands. As if the terrified look on his face wasn’t a dead giveaway. “You _were_!”

“I wasn’t. When?” When exactly are we talking about? I don’t--” Aziraphale was flapping now, wiggling nervously in the wingback chair he’d reupholstered last winter, the cat hanging on for dear life. “You’re being ridiculous, Crowley.”

“I’m being ridiculous? You’re the one who was going on about sex!”

“Going on? No, I wasn’t!”

“Oh, and it’s even better than that, isn’t it?” Crowley grinned. It gave way to a laugh. “You made a joke about sex.”

“I mean--I suppose one could said that. Technically.”

“Well, you technically made a joke about not wanting to fuck me,” Crowley said. “Eh, how’s that sit on your tongue, angel? How’s that?”

Aziraphale spluttered and the cat leapt away, doing some spluttering herself. “Would you rather,” he said icily, “that I have said that I _did_ want to ‘fuck’ you? Hmmm? Would that have been more amusing?”

Crowley thought about that for a moment. The notion put a not-unpleasant twist in his guy. “Not amusing,” he said at last. “But more interesting.”

There are many words that have been used to describe the concept of human sexual intercourse over the millenia. _Interesting_ is not generally one.

“Interesting?” Aziraphale’s nose wrinkled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s supposed to mean what it says. Interesting.”

“A chessboard is interesting. An Agatha Christie mystery is interesting.” Aziraphale’s voice was rising in volume. He wasn’t sure why. “To some, I suppose, maths are _interesting_!”

Crowley shrugged and slugged back the last drops of his whiskey. “Yeah, so?”

“So,” Aziraphale said as if Crowley were a particularly stupid lemon tree, “the act of physical procreation is not...that!”

“What is it, then, if you’re such a bloody expert? How would you describe it? Pray tell, enlighten me.”

“Well, according to what I’ve read, it’s very messy.”

“Messy,” Crowley said. “Uh huh.”

“And”--Aziraphale cast about for the right adjectives; it had been several decades since he’d read the complete works of Jacqueline Susann, whom he regarded as one of the foremost human experts on the subject--“it’s, er, painful sometimes.”

Crowley snorted. “If you’re doing it wrong, sure. If you put the key in the wrong hole.”

“Loud,” Aziraphale said. “It’s also loud. And it requires the changing of sheets.”

“Top sheet or fitted?”

“Um, both, I should think. If both parties reach, ah...the heights of act, that is.”

“Bugger that,” Crowley said, apropos. “I hate changing the fitted sheet. Those fuckers never stay where you put them.”

“Exactly!” Aziraphale took momentary refuge in brandy. There wasn’t nearly enough left. “So sex, then: not really worth it all.”

Crowley tapped his glass against his teeth. “Tch. But what if you didn’t have sex in a bed? No sheets to muck up then.”

This conversation, as terrifying as it was for Aziraphale, was not going in quite the direction he’d expected. He wasn’t sure if he was disappointed or relieved. “No,” he said. “No sheets then.”

“They do that, don’t they? Have sex somewhere other than that.”

“So I’m told. Or, ah, so I’ve read. I’ve never”--here Aziraphale blushed--“I’ve not done much observation-based research on the subject.”

“Ah. You mean you’ve never watched them do it.”

“No! Of course I haven’t.”

“Oh, come on. Even back in the day, when they hadn’t figured out how to build houses yet? When only the smartest of them had figured out caves? They were shagging right out in the open then.”

“There’s no need to be crass.”

“I’m not. I’m reporting the facts as I saw them.” Here Crowley leered. “And oh, boy, angel, did I see.”

This was in truth somewhat of a lie. Crowley had observed humans engaged in sexual congress over the years but only infrequently; he could have counted such occasions on both of his hands. It wasn’t that he found the activity distasteful or downright hilarious, as many of the fallen did. It was that there were other activities he preferred to spend his time on, like goosing revolutions or encouraging a particularly daft bit of bureaucracy or losing himself in a 99 proof bourbon and some low down good records of soul. So he knew how it worked, generally speaking, and frankly, for him that was enough. Now, though, watching Aziraphale twist himself into a tizzy over the subject, he wished that he knew a lot more. There were few pleasures (including those noted above) that he enjoyed more than watching his oldest friend in the world get worked up into a squirm.

“You did?” Aziraphale said. “You never said.”

“You didn’t ask.”

“It never occured to me.”

Crowley spread his arms and with a nudge, turned off the telly and bumped up the lights. “Here I am, then,” he said. “Your own private source for information about sex, the act of procreation. What do you want to know?”

“If you know so much, how come you didn’t know the bit about the sheets?”

“Because I wasn’t paying attention to the linens, Az! I was paying attention to the, you know--the more interesting bits.”

Aziraphale folded his arms. “Like what?”

Shit, Crowley thought. I should've taken notes. The last act of sex he’d observed had been almost a century ago, in the evening shadows of St. James Park. “Er,” he said. “They like to do it in the dark.”

“Hardly a revelation. What else?”

“It seems to go best when there’s a lot of kissing. Before anything gets too, you know, penetrate-y.”

“Hmmm.”

“And”--he searched his memories for the mental darrogotype of that warm, spring evening; recalled the smell of the trees, the sound of the path under his feet, the faces of the two men he’d startled in the dark, still crowned by top hats--”sometimes they don’t take all their accoutrements off first.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“Sometimes,” Crowley said, “they have sex while still mostly dressed.”

Aziraphale frowned. “How is that possible? Their anatomy isn’t that easily accessible, is it?”

“For those with a penis it is. That’s kind of the whole point of the thing, ha. No pun intended. So when two people with penises get together, there isn’t a lot of undressing required.”

“Even for penetration? That sounds uncomfortable.”

“Maybe. I dunno.” The men in the park hadn’t looked uncomfortable, had they? They certainly hadn’t sounded that way. “I only saw it once.”

“Hmmm.” There was, Aziraphale noted, a serious gap in his knowledge on this point. He’d never read in real detail about two people with penises having sex. He made a mental note to poke about online in the morning.

“But the _kissing_ ,” Crowley said, with rather more emphasis than he’d intended, “that’s what seems to be really key.”

“I’ve seen people kiss, Crowley. They do make it rather hard to miss. I’ve seen tongues out on the sidewalk in the middle of the afternoon.”

“What, down the village? They don’t strike me as the public snogging type.”

“No, not in the village. In London.”

“Ah, yeah. Of course.”

There was a beat of silence, filled by the sound of the rain and the silent figures on the television screen. Such silence happened occasionally in the little cottage: when Aziraphale was reading or Crowley was drinking himself silly in the bath or when they were watching the next episode of whatever TV series they’d become entranced with; that month, it was _Foyle’s War_. But it was rare for them to pop up and make both angel and demon feel, as they did on that night, quite so uncomfortable and uneasy.

“May I ask you something?” Aziraphale said at last.

Crowley swirled the melted ice in his glass. “Sure.”

“Have you ever thought about that? About...doing any of that?”

“Meh.” Crowley tried to sound nonchalant. “Maybe a few times, when this world was young and I was monumentally stupid.”

“Because you could have, if you’d wanted. Possessed somebody and, er, gone looking for another body to do those things with.”

“Still could, I suppose.”

It seemed to Crowley then that even though the angel was speaking, he was somehow also holding his breath. “But just to be absolutely clear,” Aziraphale said, “you’ve never done that. Right?”

“No.”

When you know someone a long time, when you’ve spent several millennia surreptitiously by their side, they become in some ways like a song whose lyrics you know front to back. Every key shift, every chorus, every exhale audible on a recording: you know it without being conscious of that knowledge, after a time. So it was with Crowley and Aziraphale. They knew each other’s sighs, the variations of the other’s smile; they could read body language and intonation and gage precisely how pissed off or pleased or just plain exhausted the other one was. Living together had only intensified this unspoken knowledge, this fundamental level of understanding that informed each step of their days. They had saved the world and scared the pants off their bosses and somehow, managed to create a kind of life together that neither had ever been able to fashion alone. For the first time in their long, long lives, what they had found together was peace. And a mutual affection for cats, particularly a great bedraggled beast named Toast who’d followed Aziraphale home from the village and a small, black shadow called Susan who’d hopped up in Crowley’s lap one afternoon at teatime and never technically left.

So when Crowley said _No_ just then, Aziraphale heard it, that hidden hitch in the demon’s breath. The hitch that betrayed a strange Neapolitan ice cream of feelings: nervousness, fear, and joy.

It was that knowledge (and two snifters of brandy), then, that imbued Aziraphale with the courage to say what he did next:

“Have you ever thought about doing any of that,” he said, “with me?”

“Any--what?” Crowley cleared his throat. “D’you mean sex?”

“Mmmm,” Aziraphale said vaguely. “Or kissing. Which can be part of sex, I guess.”

“Truth be told?”

“That would be preferable, yes.”

“I hadn’t. Not until we started having this conversation.”

This wasn’t entirely true, either. There had been an afternoon some months before when Crowley had discovered Aziraphale asleep in the very wingback where he now sat, a book sprawled on his knee and Toast asleep at his feet. His head had fallen back exposing the soft lines of his throat and he was snoring gently, the sound barely stirring a breeze, and for one sharp, startling second, Crowley had _wanted_ , in very large capital letters, to lean over and cover Aziraphale’s lips with his own. It shocked him, how much he wanted to do it, how clearly he could see some version of himself two steps in the future doing exactly that.

But a bird had flown too close to the french doors and Toast had leapt up to warn it off and Aziraphale had sat up, blinking, rubbing his eyes like a child. He smiled when he spotted Crowley, still hovering just inside the door with a strange, startled look on his face.

“Hello,” Aziraphale said. “Did I have a bit of a nap?”

Crowley had blinked at him, swallowed hard, said: “You must have.”

“Ah, well.” Aziraphale had set his book carefully on the coffee table and stretched his arms far and wide above his head. “I suppose I’m not in the mood for Ishiguro today. He can be rather staid, can’t he? But that is the whole point of his oeuvre, hmm?” He glanced at the clock, a tall, willowy thing that had stood in the bookshop for years. “Well. What shall we have for lunch?”

“I’ve made it. That’s why I came to--that’s why I was looking for you.” Crowley had felt as though something were wrapped about his throat; the words were coming out half-croaked. “Bacon and tomato sandwiches.”

Aziraphale beamed. “Lovely! And crisps?”

“‘Course. The really salty ones like they have at the pub.”

The angel had slipped around the chair and squeezed Crowley’s arm. “How good of you to make lunch.”

“Well,” Crowley had said with a flush. “Not really. I was hungry, too.”

So he hadn’t kissed Aziraphale that day, nor on any of the subsequent days in which echoes of the same thought had occurred. Had he done so on any of those occasions, it’s likely he would have tasted tea and the butter biscuits the angel had picked up in town, along with a soft hint of ozone that belong to all the angels and a sweetness that was all Aziraphale’s own.

And, for the record, although he would have been initially startled by the unexpected turn of events, Aziraphale would have, in fact, kissed Crowley back.

In actual fact, then, Crowley’s statement-- _Not until we started having this conversation_ \--was not true at all.

But its effect was the right one, if Aziraphale’s face were any measure: excited with a slight fringe of gut-twisting worry.

“I’ve thought about it,” the angel said. “More than once, before now. Kissing and...other things.”

“Have you now?”

“Mmmm.”

“Interesting,” Crowley said, his thoughts suddenly aflutter. “Very interesting.”

“Is it? I suppose it is, rather.”

“Az, do me a favor.”

“Hmmm?”

Crowley grinned, the sort of smile that makes even a demon’s face ache. “Stop supposing and get over here, please.”

It will come as no surprise that their first attempt at a kiss was, in a word, unsuccessful. Crowley didn’t know where to put his hands and Aziraphale used too much tongue. It wasn’t good.

“Hang on,” Crowley said, catching the angel by the collar. “Slow down, eh? Let’s try that again.”

By their third kiss, then, and most certainly by the fourth, Crowley had figured out that Aziraphale liked having hands in his hair and Aziraphale had found a more appropriate way in which to use his tongue and then, oh then, on the little cottage’s couch, they both began to have an inkling about what all the bloody fuss was all about.

“Oh,” Aziraphale said when Crowley’s mouth discovered his neck. “Oh, my. That is--”

“Oh,” Crowley said when Aziraphale’s fingers wormed under his shirt and palmed the hot skin there, stroked it soft with his thumbs. “Oh, heaven. That is--”

“Crowley?”

“Hmm?” Crowley licked a spot under Aziraphale’s ear, just to see what would happen. The feedback he received was entirely positive. “What is it, darling?”

“Do we have to decide if we both have penises tonight?” He clutched at Crowley’s biceps and elicited an energetic purr. “I’d like to do some more reading first. There are several points on which clarification would, I think, help tremendously before I make any decisions vis-a-vis genitalia.”

Another lick, a small kiss. “That seems very wise.”

“I thought so.”

Crowley chuckled. “Of course you did. You’ve always been a fan of your own ideas, Az. The biggest, might I add. President of your own bloody fan club, that’s you.”

He felt Aziraphale’s nails catch his shoulders, the pleasant strain of an intractable grip. “Crowley?”

“Yes?”

“Do shut up.”

“Hey, you’re the one who started talking, angel.”

Aziraphale’s smile was soft and impossibly bright. “Be that as it may,” he murmured, “shut up, dear, and kiss me again.”


	3. Chapter 3

In the morning, there was toast and coffee. Scrambled eggs and a rasher of bacon. The cats were fed and let out into the garden; plans for the day were discussed (Crowley: pruning the rose bushes; Aziraphale: staking out the summer lettuce). One more cup of coffee. More cream.

It was not unlike most of the other mornings that had passed since the not-end-of-the-world, except, of course, for this: 

On his way to the mudroom to fetch gardening gloves--the nice ones made from Gore-Tex--Aziraphale came back to the table and smoothed his hand over Crowley’s cheek and when the demon was smiling, he chased his mouth over his best friend’s parted lips. A soft kiss, a sweet one; a reminder of the night before, of all the nights still to come: bodies to be bared, in time, mysteries of the flesh to be named and explored.

“I love you,” Crowley said before the angel could pull away.

“Really?” Aziraphale asked. He sounded utterly delighted.

Crowley kissed the tip of his nose, a silly gesture that nonetheless made his knees feel like jelly. “Really. Unless you’d like to try and talk me out of it.”

Aziraphale tipped their foreheads together. Crowley felt the brush of the angel’s lashes. “I’d rather not,” Aziraphale said, “because as it happens, I love you, too.”

These events marked only a small change in the routine of their days together, yes, but then, those are the changes that matter, aren’t they? Not the grand gestures of which everybody is so fond, but the hiccups that appear like a different color thread woven in the texture of the day. No stitch missed, no pattern gone wrong: just a hint of an unexpected color that makes the eye stop and say, oh hang on.

And so it was with Aziraphale and Crowley, two creatures who had chosen to sit at the loom of life together many, many years ago but whose fingers only now threaded through the colors of the world as one.

“Az?”

“Yes, dear?”

“You’re going to have to let me go eventually, you know.” (A statement belied by Crowley having wound his arms firmly around the waist of Aziraphale’s trousers, but no matter.)

“Am I?” Aziraphale kissed Crowley’s temple. “I suppose you’re right. But not just yet, hmmm?”


End file.
